00:00 We had this crazy idea, people thought we were nuts.
00:04 The worst thing that could happen is I have a fuel leak or a wheel explodes going down the track.
00:08 That would be a bad day.
00:09 They're having a big rock and racing event here, so we showed up and kind of crashed their party and seems to be a hit so far.
00:25 The vehicle being shown today at the rock and race event is definitely one of a kind.
00:30 My name is Chad Clark.
00:35 Oh, I thought so.
00:40 Yeah, dang, dang.
00:41 I'm Mike Monter.
00:43 And this is the Thunder Buggy.
00:53 When people see the Thunder Buggy, they just can't believe their eyes.
00:56 And the first question is, does it really move?
00:59 And yes, it does.
01:00 It does move, but not in the traditional sense, which would have been with the help of a horse or two.
01:07 The nostalgic race weekend.
01:09 What's more nostalgic than an Amish buggy?
01:11 Yeah, we go way back.
01:12 Helping this buggy up the racetrack is not a regular engine either.
01:23 It's like oil and water.
01:25 They should not go together.
01:27 No earthly business having an Amish buggy and a jet engine together.
01:30 But how did this jet powered buggy come into existence?
01:34 Mike and I were at our local county fair watching a truck and tractor pull.
01:39 I mentioned to him it would be a really cool idea to build a turbine powered four wheel drive pulling truck.
01:43 So I went home that night and found an engine online, bought it.
01:47 Didn't realize it was not turbo shaft.
01:51 It was turbo jet only.
01:53 So I had to come up with a different concept than a pulling truck.
01:57 So the lightweight vehicle, we live in the Amish capital of the world.
02:00 So I figured Amish buggy would be perfect.
02:03 Called me up and said, we're not doing a pulling truck anymore.
02:06 We're doing an Amish buggy.
02:07 Seemed natural.
02:09 The buggy is not designed to take, you know, 100 feet of electrical wiring and fuel tanks and a jet engine.
02:21 It's a really simple engine design.
02:23 It's a pretty awesome engineering for back in the 40s.
02:27 We built a steel subframe to carry the extra weight.
02:31 That's about the only thing that we did chassis wise to strengthen the buggy other than airbags.
02:38 We got a mix of aircraft gauges and car gauges.
02:43 This red handles for emergency fuel shut off in the event of an accident.
02:47 With a jet engine, this buggy must have some serious speed in it.
02:52 Top speed so far has been 55 to 60 miles an hour.
02:56 Or maybe not.
02:58 This particular setup, that's probably max because, you know, we kept the buggy as original as possible.
03:04 There's no safety cage.
03:06 There's, you know, I've got a driver seat seat belts, but it's still a wood vehicle.
03:10 Today, the team have brought the Thunder Buggy to rock and race.
03:19 I'll be doing all the crew chief work, making sure he's safe, making sure there's no fuel leaks,
03:25 all the electrical, towing the vehicle up to the starting line.
03:28 With Mike on technical support, Chad will be holding on for dear life.
03:32 And that's not surprising, as there's not a lot of protection for the driver of this vehicle.
03:37 The worst thing that could happen is that I'm going to be in a wheelchair.
03:42 I'm going to be in a wheelchair for a long time.
03:44 The worst thing that could happen is I have a fuel leak and the engine runs away.
03:51 Or a wheel explodes going down the track.
03:55 Yeah, that would be a bad day.
03:57 Buggy wheels aren't speed rated.
03:59 Not yet.
04:00 Not yet.
04:01 It's time for this Amish automobile to show the audience what it can do.
04:05 [Music]
04:17 [Engine starting]
04:19 [Engine revving]
04:38 [Music]
04:42 It's fun to come to the track or an air show and see the reactions of people.
04:47 When they drive by it, they almost break their neck.
04:49 Like, is that really real?
04:51 We've had mechanical engineers and people come up.
04:54 It's kind of nice when you're sitting in your garage thinking about building things
04:58 and you actually have an engineer come up and go, "Okay, you did that all right.
05:01 You weren't complete idiots."
05:02 Right.
05:03 We made it!
05:04 People thought we were nuts.
05:05 And I think that might have been part of the motivation behind of it, to get this thing done.
05:10 We'll show you.
05:11 Yeah, hold my beer moment. Watch this.
05:14 It's something that's unconventional. You don't see it every day.
05:17 And people seem to love it.
05:19 [Music]
05:21 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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